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November 10, 2007
Two things:
1. My friends Ben and Amy are getting married today. We weren’t able to go, but just wanted to wish the love, life and luck . . . you know, the good stuff. Much love from us to you on your big day. And, on a completely different vibe . . .
2. Everyone is talking about the Yeats poem “The Second Coming” and it’s relevance to our current situation in Iraq. I’ve been re-reading a bunch of pre/during/and post WWI poetry and thought I’d share it for those of you who’ve not read it before — not because I think the end of the world is coming (I mean, I guess it is technically) but because it’s just plain rad. BTW, it’s not just now that people are talking about this poem [or WWI era lit in general (ie T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” etc)] — Joan Didion wrote a book called “Slouching Toward Bethlehem”. I think Joni Mitchell has a song called that too. OK, here it is:
William Butler Yeats — The Second Coming (1920)
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?Posted on 11.10.07